The Homecoming

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1964

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Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Character Analysis

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Act IIAct Summaries & Analyses

Act II, Scene 1 Summary

It is afternoon, and the men of the family smoke cigars after lunch. Max takes the opportunity to tell Ruth about his married life with Jessie. Jessie, he says, “…was the backbone to this family” (46), giving the men moral instruction. Max, meanwhile, worked long hours in the butchery trade, never quite sealing the big payday that would put the family on easy street. The memory of a deal that went poorly sours Max’s mood. He turns to berating Sam and his sons, as well as calling Jessie, whom only moments ago he described in glowing terms, a “slutbitch” (47). Sam leaves for work under a barrage of aspersions against his ability as a driver and even his sexuality.

As if nothing has happened, Max asks after Teddy. He praises his son for his choice of wife and expresses pride in Teddy acquiring his doctorate in America. Max also wonders if Teddy and Ruth’s three sons are missing their parents. Teddy is sure they are. Lenny steers the conversation towards concerns he has about the integrity of the Church, but Teddy politely declines Lenny’s questions. Eventually, Max, Lenny, and Joey leave to go to the boxing gym, leaving Teddy and Ruth alone.

Teddy suggests that he and Ruth cut short their visit, expressing anxiety about getting back to their children. Ruth senses that Teddy might in some way be ashamed of his family; she seems more relaxed about staying their planned three days. Teddy, though, insists on leaving and hurries upstairs to pack.

Lenny reappears. He and Ruth chat about their lives, with Ruth fondly recalling how she used to be a model before she met Teddy. Teddy soon reappears, ready to leave. He offers Ruth her coat in a bid to make her leave with him, but Lenny puts on some music and invites Ruth to dance. Despite Teddy’s protestations, Ruth agrees and dances with Lenny. Max and Joey reappear from the gym, and all of them witness Lenny and Ruth kiss. Joey remarks on the scene:

JOEY. Christ, she’s wide open. Dad, look at that.

Pause.

She’s a tart (58).

Emboldened by his brother, Joey swoops in and draws Ruth to the sofa, where he kisses and lies down on top of her. Lenny continues to caress her hair. Max makes to say goodbye to Teddy, happy to send him off without his wife.

Ruth demands a drink and Lenny serves everyone whiskey. Ruth, remembering her husband, asks him if his family has read his work. A somewhat flustered Teddy launches into a defense of his work, claiming his family would never understand it. Teddy says his education sets him apart from the world his family inhabits: “You’re just objects. You just…move about. I can observe it. I can see what you do. It’s the same as I do. But you’re lost in it. You won’t get me being…I won’t be lost in it” (62). With those words, the scene ends.

Act II, Scene 2 Summary

The lights come up on a candid conversation between Sam and Teddy. Sam tells his nephew he was always his favorite of the boys. He also thanks Teddy for a letter he sent Sam from the US and urges him to stay longer in London.

Lenny enters. He is outraged to find Teddy has eaten a cheese sandwich he set aside earlier. A smug Teddy refuses to apologize. This brings the rivalry between the brothers to the surface, and Lenny accuses Teddy of looking down on the rest of the family. Before things can turn nasty, Joey descends the stairs and joins the others in the living room.

“I didn’t get all the way” (66), says Joey. It turns out that he has spent the last two hours upstairs with Ruth. Lenny says Ruth must be a “tease” and asks Teddy for confirmation. Far from being horrified, Teddy is casual about his wife’s infidelity and questions Joey’s skills as a lover. Lenny and Joey mount a defense of his virility.

Max and Sam return home and weigh in on the situation. Max buys Lenny’s line about Ruth being a “tease” and is indignant at her supposed treatment of Joey. Nonetheless, a brainwave hits him: “You know something? Perhaps it’s not a bad idea to have a woman in the house. Perhaps it’s a good thing. Who knows? Maybe we should keep her” (69).

Teddy at first offers some resistance. He says Ruth is unwell and that they really should get back to their children in America as soon as possible. Sam dismisses the idea too. Max ignores their protestations and starts forming a plan, with Joey and Lenny chipping in ideas. The problem, as Max and his sons see it, is the expense of adding a woman to the household. Lenny claims to have the solution: Lenny is a pimp, and he will pimp out Ruth from an apartment in Soho (one of London’s traditional red-light districts). That way, Ruth will pay her own way while also cooking and cleaning for the family.

Ruth descends and joins the men. Teddy informs her the family would like her to stay and that he has no objection. She’ll be “…a kind of guest” (75), he says. Max assures her the proposed arrangement is “…an offer from [their] heart” (75). Ruth at first declines, but Max says she is the only woman worthy of replacing Jessie (although only moments beforehand he was calling Ruth a “whore”). Ruth negotiates better conditions and eventually agrees.

It is all too much for Sam. He interrupts to tell the group that their revered, macho friend MacGregor once had sex with Jessie in the back of Sam’s car. He then promptly collapses. Joey confirms that Sam has not died, but beyond that no one shows him much sympathy or offers him help. Teddy remarks that he had hoped Sam would drive him to the airport. Max tells him how to get there via public transport, and the father and son say their goodbyes. Max becomes sentimental again and presses a photo of himself on Teddy for him to show to his children (Max’s grandchildren). Teddy bids his brothers and wife farewell and then leaves, with Ruth calling after him, “Don’t become a stranger” (80).

Joey and Lenny hover near Ruth. Sam remains unconscious on the floor. Max, having engineered what seemed like a victory, plunges into self-doubt: Has he found a replacement for Jessie, only to lose her to his sons? He wonders aloud if he is too old for Ruth’s affections, whether Ruth will uphold her end of the bargain, and whether she will adapt. His sons stand there in silence. Max falls to his knees begging Ruth for a kiss and assuring anyone who will listen that he is not too old. The curtain falls on Max’s humiliation before Ruth and his sons.

Act II Analysis

If Act I explores the crumbling of this family in the absence of its matriarch, Act II shows how it intends to replace her. Although Teddy makes an early bid to escape the family with Ruth, he is gradually thwarted over the course of the act and becomes a willing accomplice in the sacrifice of his wife to his father, uncle, and brothers.

Jessie, Max claims, lent the family moral fiber—the idealized role of the wife/mother in the traditional nuclear family. Whether Jessie fulfilled this role in the typical way (her alleged affair with MacGregor casts her in a different light), what ultimately matters to the men of the household is the idea of her as a moral center. In her absence, they seem to have no center at all. The frayed respect for family loyalty present in Act I reaches its logical conclusion here: Joey and the others prey on Ruth as if she were any other woman rather than a sister-in-law. Teddy too seems to have abandoned the role of husband, foregoing any anger at Ruth’s infidelity. He compares notes on her manner in bed with his brothers when they speculate that she has teased Joey rather than leaping to her defense or rushing upstairs to drag her out of the corrupted family home.

Still, Teddy displays some insecurity at the situation when Ruth comes downstairs and his family begins to grill him about his work. His success in America begins to feel fragile, especially if his family cannot understand or recognize it. Now, he pleads with Ruth to leave: “I think we’ll go back. Mmmn?” (54). With growing urgency, he remarks, “…I’d like to go back and see the boys now” (54).

Ruth might have already been tempted to stay while remembering the freedom of her single life and her burgeoning modeling career. By the time Teddy returns with their packed suitcases, Lenny has seduced her. Teddy says they should leave. Ruth ignores him and acquiesces to Lenny’s request to dance. Soon both Joey and Lenny are all over her (literally) as the younger brother lies atop her on the sofa and Lenny plays with her hair.

Teddy begins to unravel, ranting about the intellectual superiority of his academic work. What he really drives at, though, is the idea that his accomplishments separate him from his family and the milieu that he has left behind. “You’re lost in it” (62), Teddy says, “I won’t be lost in it” (62). The “it” here is ambiguous and likely does not refer to one particular thing. Rather, it gestures towards the ensemble of outside forces shaping his family’s life in this tumultuous, changing postwar society, including the forces that have penetrated the house in the absence of its lynchpin, Jessie. Teddy thought he had escaped his family’s fate, but he has been sucked back into their mire, causing him to panic.

By Act II, Scene 2, however, Teddy has resigned himself to this fate. His dad and brothers plot to absorb Ruth into the family, albeit only if she becomes a sex worker to pay the bills. It is another cold calculation of the type Max displayed in Act I when threatening Sam with eviction. Much as Max’s memories of Jessie have veered between patriarchal society’s two modes of conceptualizing women—idealization and degradation—Ruth finds herself a victim of the men’s Madonna-whore complex. Max and his sons pigeonhole Ruth in these two polarized roles, the wholesome homemaker on the one hand and the lascivious sex worker on the other. Reducing her human complexity to these roles helps them reassert the confused and compromised masculinity that they have displayed over the course of the play and initially seems to mitigate some of the tension between them as they bond over their shared conquest.

Max, though, will become a victim of this same ruthless (perhaps Pinter’s intent in naming his female lead “Ruth”) situation. In the dog-eat-dog world he seems so keen to embrace, he too is disposable. Having helped persuade Ruth to stay, he pines one last time for a real family life by wishing that his grandchildren might see a picture of him. However, he closes the door on that life when he sees Teddy out. In its stead, there is only the impersonal, cynical world that he has ushered into the family home: Lenny and Joey are unmoved by his appeals to share in Ruth’s affections. They stand impassively over him (as he kneels) and the prone Sam, a generation that has outlived its usefulness to them. Max’s whimpering is the last thing the audience hears as he realizes that his atomized family has replaced not only Jessie, but also its need for him.